Musings of a mad old bat

I had a renewal form from the DVLA for Lucy's road fund licence tax, and it's gone up enormously. I now have to pay £180 as opposed to £115 payable by people whose cars are less than 1549 cc. That's an extra £75 which is grossly unfair when you consider that I probably only drive 3000 miles per year now, if not a lot less and that I only bought a larger car because of my difficulties with arthritis. I'm so angry I want to break something!

BARF TWO!

Last night I was terribly sick again at 1.00 am. It was exactly the same as last time. I went to the loo for a pee, and just as I was leaving the bathroom, I had this overwhelming sickness. Again, it was lucky I was already in the bathroom, because I really wouldn't have made it there from my bedroom.

I really didn't want to eat anything this morning, but I have to eat something because of taking my pills, so I had an apple. For lunch I had dry toast, but I still felt digestively uncertain enough not to dare to go to the Lit & Phil. By this evening, of course, I was back to normal, so we've had our usual Friday evening kebab. No doubt I shall find out at 1.00 am whether that was extremely foolish or not. I didn't want to disappoint John and Charles, though. I'm sitting here looking at an apple, wondering if I dare.........

I had planned to go to the Lit & Phil this afternoon, but in the end I didn't dare!

Still, I had a pleasant enough afternoon at home, doing some character plotting for my new project. I'm amazed at how long it's taken, although I have done it in quite a lot of detail. I really enjoyed doing it too, so even if, as usual, I end up boring myself rigid and eventually have to file it in the WPB, I will at least have enjoyed doing it this time. However, this time I wrote a Prologue and am still fairly pleased with it, although it will probably have to be edited quite severely.

Whenever I've tried to write a long piece before, I've always worked out the plot beforehand and then written until it made me so bored I could scream. If it bores me, how boring must it be for a reader? This time I decided to leap in with a place and a vague idea, without a worked-out plot but with a cast of characters. It was quite fun looking up suitable names on Scroogle. I based the characters on a group of people I used to know quite well. I haven't plotted the two main characters yet but I have them in my mind's eye and I really already know what they're going to be like. One will be a little like I would be if I were bold, brave and beautiful, not to mention clever, resourceful and funny, the other will be more difficult.

I've also got to decide what will be the first turning point and when it will happen, although I do have an as yet unformed idea. I need a name for the Island, too, but nothing too Tolkien or Dungeons and Dragons-ish

While I'm trying to tripe this, I'm also trying to listen to the repeat of a marvellous drama-doc that I heard this morning on BBC7 called Blue Veils and Golden Sands about Delia Derbyshire the famous woman from the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop who did the Doctor Who music. It's absolutely fascinating. I hope Charles is listening; I really want him to hear it, because this strange woman reminds me so much of him with her obsession with electronic music and sampling and remixing. It is on again at 2.15 am, so I hope he listens to one of the performances. It seems that she was patronised and rather badly treated by the BBC, but as I understand it, it wasn't unusual for that to happen to their creative staff.

In the end I had to stop writing and listen to the play again. Wonderful! Oh well! Back to theJazz! No way am I listening to Stephen Fry being arch and coy and terribly unfunny!

I suppose I shall have to do some vegetable shopping tomorrow, although we can't decide what to eat this week-end. I thought I'd make a quiche tomorrow but Charles really doesn't fancy it. It's useless asking John; he always says "Shepherd's Pie", when he really means Cottage pie.

Maybe we can have the liver tomorrow and Chicken Dish on Saturday. I shall definitely have to get some lovely fresh greens and I know we're out of carrots again. I keep thinking of plates full of lightly cooked purple sprouting dripping with butter!

Charles has just been in to tell me that he listened to the Delia Derbyshire programme and enjoyed it. We talked about the way she was treated at the BBC and how sad it was that she had to wait for recognition till she was on the point of death. Still, I suppose she did at least get it before she died. I hadn't realised how influential she was on modern music until I heard the programme.

I think I shall go to bed shortly to listen to theJazz and read my new Tom Holt Barking. I shan't dare go to sleep until 1.00 am is safely past, just in case.

I've just realised that British Summer Time will be starting again at the end of the month. I haven't got used to GMT yet! I must try to get some early nights in before then to get ready, because I always find it tremendously destabilising. I can't be the only one, surely?

I just looked at the weather forecast and we have severe weather warnings for gales on Monday and Tuesday, although there's only a 20% chance that it will be bad this far North.

I made an appointment with my doctor this morning, but the first one available is a week tomorrow.

I made the appointment, but I hope I shall be better by then and can cancel it. The trouble is that she's a very popular doctor and she only works 4 days a week.

I find it pointless seeing another doctor unless it's an actual emergency like when my abscess broke, because there's such a lot of background and medication to consider and in any case, I have so much faith in her, as it seems others do too.

In the meantime my ribs are aching even more, although I didn't wake coughing in the night or even this morning and neither John nor Charles heard me coughing last night. It's a mystery! It's so bad now that it hurts even to laugh!

I've decided to have an afternoon trying to write at home, and tomorrow I shall go to the Lit & Phil.

Charles has his second IT class tomorrow. I've told him that he must register his disappointment at there being no Digital Photography class and to point out that he acquired a camera specifically to take part in the advertised class. I've also told him to ask if there isn't some way he can skip through at least the first part of the ECDL, because it's terminally boring for someone of 32 who has been using computers since he was 7 and it will probably put him off going quite soon. The he'll never get the photography course!

It's another lovely day today but very cold indeed. The forecast is for it to get even colder tonight and tomorrow so I think I shall leave the heating on tonight, because it takes soooo long to warm this house up if it gets very cold. It's lovely in the summer when it's nice and cool when you come in from outside, but it's a hooter in winter!

My digestion seems to have recovered, although I still feel a little nauseated if I think about it, but I still have a vague headache. It doesn't really seem as though it was a migraine, or anything else specific, and I don't really think it was overeating, so I'm putting it down to one of those 24 hour bugs, which no-one else seems to have caught, fortunately.

It has had the effect of putting me off anything but the plainest of food, so my lovely box of Mother's Day chocs is untouched except for the two I gave to John and Charles.

I did go to Costco yesterday even though I felt fragile, because we needed wet food for the Tootles and they were beginning to look very reproachful. We also needed bottled water.

What I found there was a box of blackberries from some unlikely country I can't now remember and they are now sitting in the fridge waiting for me to turn them into blackberry, blackberry liqueur and rosewater muffins!

I simply must stop messing about on the Internet and get stuck into my character plotting.

Today I went to my first writing class with Gillian for three years. I really have missed it! And her!And so many other women friends! It's a bit difficult for all of us to get there by 9.30 rather than 10.15 as we used to do at the Centre for Lifelong Learning, but we're bound by the rental terms and I can't really complain since I'm so much nearer than almost anyone else.

There were fourteen of us today and I knew everyone except for three people. They were all pleased to see me again.

The only problem is that Brunswick Methodist Church is right in the centre of Newcastle and although there's a little road outside, albeit with double yellow lines, I'm not sure how to get to the road, since the access to it seems to be over pedestrianised roads and I'm not sure what I'm allowed to do about this with my Blue Badge. It would be great if I could park there, as I couldn't ring for John to pick me up today because it was pouring with rain and there was nowhere for me to sit and wait in the dry till he came. I staggered slowly round to the taxi rank and had to pay £5.20 to get home. While I was being driven home, John rang me to ask where I was as he'd sweetly driven into town to collect me without being asked. He was just a little cross!

I thoroughly enjoyed the session. The thing about these classes is that I can totally forget about my problems, about not being very fit and unable to walk far, in fact, I almost forget who I am and the family doesn't even get a look-in.

Today we had instant coffee and a natty little heater which supplied boiling water, but normally the centre coffee-bar will be open and we can get something to eat and drink there. There's also a lift so that I don't have to toil up a long flight of stairs stopping every so often to catch my breath.

We did an interesting exercise today about awaiting re-incarnation where we were to give reasons as to why we didn't want to return as human beings. Much of it was richly comic and almost all of it was profound. I may even take what I wrote further since it has sparked something off in my head, which, of course, is what it's meant to do!

I've decided that I must start going to the Lit & Phil again. because it concentrates my mind on writing. Apart from the writing class and an appointment next week for the local CT meeting, I don't have any appointments until the 19th. February at the moment, so next week would be a good time to start going again and now I have a Blue Badge, I can park practically right outside.

I'm glad now that I didn't sign up to the old class after Gillian fell out with the University. Although it's now being run by someone I like and respect, it's been reduced to 2 hours, and it really isn't long enough, although they've put the fees down commensurately. Some of the women at today's class who had been to the other one last term said that it somehow didn't quite gel for them. The way it was, the class had been running for several years and there was a large core group of people who had been coming for years; each year new people came and either didn't come back another term/year, or got absorbed into the group. It was a large supportive group of close women friends of all different ages meeting for the support of our own and each other's creative genius, not to mention people one could talk to about things one might not speak of to family or everyday friends.

While I was going through my cancer, even though I didn't get to classes for such a long time, they all made an effort to write to me or e-mail or send a card every so often so that I felt cherished and cared for and missed. It was extremely good for the mental healing process!